Responding to globalization: nation, culture and identity in Singapore

SELVARAJ VELAYUTHAM

Responding to globalization: nation, culture and identity in Singapore

Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007, pp. xii, 238, ISBN 978-981-230-421-6 hb S$59.90/US$43.90; 978-981-230-420-9 pb S$35.90/US$28.90; 978-981-230-717-0 (pdf)

Reviewed by Victor King, University of Leeds

I am tempted to start this review with the comment that I have made several times before ‘Yet another book on globalisation’. Velayutham’s claim for originality in his Singapore study, however, is that in spite of the outpouring of studies on globalisation there has been insufficient attention to the ways in which governments address its challenges in their concern to maintain and promote national identity.

This concern has been especially acute in Singapore which, as a globally interconnected city, is at the same time a relatively recently established state and a newly emergent nation. Velayutham, whose family ‘left a small village in Tamil Nadu to a modern and multicultural city-state of Singapore in search of a better life’ (p. xi) ponders the post-independence images (the ‘official discourses’) of Singapore. Central to his quest are the contradictions between the promotion of world-city status and the maintenance of a viable city- or nation-state, and the attempts to resolve or at least manage these contradictions.

In my view Velayutham’s endeavour is perhaps less original than he asserts. The images which he analyses are very familiar to those who have studied Singapore and its historical and contemporary place in the Southeast Asian region and the wider world. Singapore has always been seen as a controlled human laboratory where social engineering has been exercised on a grand scale. Therefore, I am not convinced by Velayutham’s claim that there has been ‘little attempt in the literature on Singapore to think about national identity as a product of a globalized modernity’ (p. 43). Neither am I persuaded by his argument that ‘historians have never considered envisioning Singapore’s past as always interconnected with the rest of the world’ (p. 44). Students of Singapore history can hardly ignore these interconnections nor have they. 

Much of the book treads well known territory.  Nevertheless, in the way in which the author has woven together the recent history of the city-state in the context of Singapore’s rapid economic growth and modernisation and its increasing integration into regional and global processes, his study does have value and interest. He succeeds in giving us a clear understanding of the ‘nation in transition’ narrative of the Singapore elite. One area of particular interest is his study of Singapore émigrés conducted through email surveys, an internet discussion forum, newspaper reports and selected detailed interviews with 10 Singaporeans in Australia (Sydney) in which he examines their views of home and their reasons for living and working abroad.

Velayutham, in examining the strategies adopted by government in responding to globalisation processes, argues for the continued relevance of the nation-state in the Singapore case, and its role in constructing, manipulating and trans-forming national identity. This is not an unsurprising position to adopt and one with which I concur. The route taken by the Singapore government is a very well known one, and in the construction of identity the state has directly associated the process with the need to be constantly vigilant in the face of potential crisis, instability, vulnerability and fragility. This in turn has entailed the need for the exercise of control and for the message delivered ad nauseam that its citizens must be committed, loyal, hard-working, orderly and obedient. Velayutham examines this theme of vulnerability and the anxiety-induced environment within which Singaporeans conduct their daily lives, a theme which has been addressed regularly by numerous pundits and researchers (probably Singapore has the densest population of social scientists anywhere in Southeast Asia).

Much of Velayutham’s study presents and explains the changes in image-construction since the 1960s: from the multi-cultural and multi-lingual CMIO model and its ‘imagined’ racial harmony, on to the Asian values debates and finally to the image of cosmopolitanism and Singapore’s status as a global city. This new policy demanded a set of supporting actions to equip the citizenry to take on the challenges of globalisation and to internationalise and professionalise the work force. What it has also done, despite the constraints on cultural expression imposed by the government and its particular perspective of what culture and the arts are, is to make Singapore a rather more interesting place (culturally, recreationally and touristically) than it would otherwise have been. 

Velayutham handles the historical analysis of Singapore’s movement from colony to independent state and the creation of the nation very well indeed. There is a tendency towards repetition in his narrative and certain key points become rather laboured. Nevertheless, he helps to bring together several strands of Singapore’s history into a coherent account and gives expression to some of the voices of migrant Singaporeans. But in its several parts it does not really tell us anything we did not already know.